LAST WORD: Spirits live in these walls

Damian McCarney

Earlier this year I saw a ghost in work.
At least I think so. Either I saw a ghost, or it being the middle of the night, simply imagined seeing one.
From the outside, it’s obvious that the Celt office was once Cavan Town’s train station; its history is worn much more lightly in its interior. Unless pointed out, visitors often miss the fact that the cold corridor of large granite flagstones, linking the front of office to the editorial department, is actually the old station platform.
It was from this unwelcoming channel that my spectre arrived. Working late at my desk, I felt I was being watched and something caught my eye as I glanced to the door of the reporters’ office, propped open by a fire extinguisher. There I saw the side profile of a man wearing a charcoal tweed suit, vanish into the unlit gloom of the corridor.
I tried to tell myself I’d imagined it but, within seconds, I was completely overwhelmed by the presence of evil. To flee the office I had to brave (more accurately coward) the ominous blackness of the corridor. Fumbling to find the torch on my phone I made a dash to the door, and got the hell out of there. Neither I, nor any of my colleagues, have worked late since.
Fast forward to last week. With Halloween approaching, and eager to get a ghoulish seasonal story, I asked around if anyone knew of any mediums, and was eventually directed to Mary Meade. Originally from Dublin, Mary now lives in Milltown. She appeared in the Celt office, a very respectably presented, middle aged lady, with a smile warm enough to put the most timid inter-dimensional-travelling-virgins at ease. Now, I know what you’re thinking - not in a Mary Meade way - is he really going on record that he saw a ghost, and reporting a seance as fact? If I were you, I’d be very sceptical too. I ain’t trying to convince anyone.
I recently heard a comedian discuss on radio the rationalism underpinning Scooby Doo, and realised, wowsers I was a bigger scaredy-cat than Shaggy. Whilst visiting a Gothic-style house Scooby and Shaggy would be left petrified by the sight of a ghost. However, their pal Velma (the bespectacled one) would invariably solve the mystery by lifting the ghoul’s mask, revealing it was the janitor trying to get the property at a knocked-down price, thereby exorcising the paranormal myth.
It must have been with Velma’s chutzpah that in the days following the ghost’s appearance, I confronted the Celt’s janitor. Before I could finish my sentence, wide-eyed he told me he had seen it too - and lurking in the very same place.
Yikes!
Having introduced herself, Mary was drawn immediately to a heavy red door, part of the original station, that dominates one end of the train platform. More significantly, it’s right next to where I saw the ghost.
“I’m hearing a gentleman’s voice saying, ‘Help me’,” says Mary, her right hand resting gently on the door’s patterned leaded glass. “Not in a distressed way.”
She’s seemingly tuned into the spirit world faster than I can find Northern Sound on the radio.
“I feel he’s not necessarily connected to the building itself, but I feel as if he... I’m reluctant to say something happened him on the track or anything, but it’s nearly like he... ‘got left behind’ are the words he’s used.
“Now I feel that it is more in his personal life - more about someone who was meant to meet him years and years ago, maybe a lover or a girlfriend, or someone like that but never came. I feel he kept returning to the station in hope that this other person... it is definitely a female... he hoped that she would be there, maybe like a love of his.”
As minutes pass, Mary homes in on our ghost, she prefers the word spirit. He’s a big man, and, like myself, is from Fermanagh.
“He has a lovely, lovely energy, so you’ve nothing to fear of him. He’s just a normal natural guy, but back in those days... it’s more times gone by.”
It emerges that it was 1940 that he missed his love. Mary’s face closes over.
Silence.
“He’s said his name is James. I don’t know if it makes any difference to you, knowing his name, but his name is James Fitzpatrick.
“He’s given me the name now... Elsa.”
Silence.
“No, I beg your pardon, Elsie,” Mary says with a husky laugh.
“He’s saying now basically how much he loved her, but she never came. And now he’s asking me why she never came?
“I don’t know,” Mary replies, deirectly to James.
“He’s definitely saying he means no harm, he’s a friend, he’s friendly, he’s just a little bit lost, and I don’t even feel in the world of spirit that he has met her, and this is why he is still coming. I am asking him in my thoughts to go to the light, because her spirit won’t come here. Do you understand?”
Mary reassures me that James is a “lovely gentle soul”, and he tells her he means well.
Silence.
“He’s saying to me there’s others here. Other spirits.”
Shit.
“They come and go he’s saying... I don’t know why he’s telling me, but he’s saying you need to do something nicer with here,” Mary says pointing to a grim stack of shelves. “It’s like they congregate here, so he’s saying a nice seat or something. As I say, you’ve nothing to fear, but it’s like - they’re here. Not now, but they come here.”
Apparently James wants us to remove the shelves and hang a painting, a nice landscape maybe. Great, I was spooked by a ghost more interested in feng shui than haunting.
“He’s saying to me many feet, many people have walked here. And he’s saying, in other words, respect it. There’s great history on this path - he’s using the word path.
“Now this is getting personal. So you want me to go with this?”
She did get personal, but I won’t trouble you with any McCarney ancestry she may have unearthed, metophorically speaking. Mary then graciously made time to speak to each of the Celt’s staff, with mixed results: for the most vocally sceptical reporter she made a few startlingly accurate observations; for others, more receptive, her messages ranged from spot on to so general as to be of no predictive value; while for a few, the messages made no sense. Unfazed, Mary shrugs off these return-to-sender moments, saying maybe the messages will make more sense in the future.
Mary says she was awakened to her ‘gift’ from the age of five or six. “That’s when my own particular angel started appearing to me. And I started getting messages, being told I was a messenger for those in spirit.”
Upon telling her “staunch Catholic family” they responded by wielding the holy water. Slowly, they came around to accept her gift, after Mary relayed messages from deceased loved ones who she did not know.
It was kept as “a great secret” within her family. As a teen Mary says she received inspired writings, and visions and passed on helpful messages, “when I knew it was safe to say it to people, who would accept it.” As she matured, the flow of messages became a deluge: “I thought I was going nuts, because they were constantly coming.”
Peace of mind finally arrived when another medium diagnosed Mary as “a born medium”. Twenty-five years later she still practises it, but not as her main job. Trained in holistic therapies, she concentrates on spiritual healing and has just started running a Wednesday class on meditation and mindfulness at her base in Tullywood Lodge Healing Centre in Milltown.
Only once does Mary claim to have encountered a demonic spirit - in Dublin [yes I know - insert your own joke here]. Anyway it was a terrifying ordeal which she managed to come through placing her faith in God.
“I asked my angels that - why did this happen to me? And they said you needed to know the difference - because you were too trusting.”
Does Mary find that many aren’t trusting of her? How do you feel when you are accused of being a charlatan?
“I can’t change it; I can’t change people being sceptical. I can’t change people saying that about me. I’ve moved totally away from the whole cirlce of psychics, fortune tellers, tarot cards - obviously you get pulled into that sort of stuff because it’s the field that it’s in, but now there’s that many people calling themselves mediums, they don’t even understand what the work of a medium is.
“People say, ‘Oh you are ripping people off’, and things like that, but as I say I do a lot of my work and there’s many times I don’t charge them, and I do a lot for charity. I do have to cover my living costs, but I’m certainly not in the tarot fares, cashing in on people’s vulnerabilities. I respect it too much.”
However, she adds that there’s many people who do believe but prefer to keep it a secret. “They come and see me under the cloak of darkness so that neighbours don’t know,” she says with her trademark laugh.
So as I flick through different landscape paintings online, the thought of the Celt office as a Heartbreak Hotel for gentle ghosts, far from being scary, is quite comforting.